Chapter One
The woman at the bar of the Hotel Acropole leaned on her elbows and scanned the
dim room. At not quite six feet in battered, American-style cowboy boots, Ileana
Magdalen (that’s what the name on her passport said anyway) was taller than just
about everyone else in the dingy establishment. There were no other women in the
bar, although countless numbers passed the open French windows in their head
scarves and flowing robes, more than a few concealed from head to toe by
brightly colored burqas. Ileana looked down at her sweat-stained tank top. Her
nipples protruded through the wet ribbed cotton, and she had to fight the urge
to cross her arms over her chest. Fuck it, she thought. It’s too goddamn hot for
a bra. And besides, if she had to put one more ounce of clothing on, she was
going to kill the wrong man.
Ceiling fans swatted the hot air. Outside, slender Africans and lighter-skinned
Arabs milled along the sweltering streets of Omdurman, a working-class
neighborhood in Sudan’s sprawling capital city, Khartoum. The predominant
language was Arabic, but Ileana caught snatches of Chinese, Hindi, Russian,
staccato dialects she didn’t recognize. But the most persistent noise was the
whine of traffic: horns, brakes, screeching tires, revving engines. Backfires
that sounded a little too much like gunshots for comfort. Oil had made Africa’s
largest country a thriving nation by regional standards. Unfortunately, a
significant chunk of its newfound wealth had been spent massacring its
non-Islamic citizens. Ileana had seen the devastation firsthand. She’d just
completed a two-week tour of the western province of Darfur with Francois Dumas,
a French epidemiologist with the World Health Organization, after which she and
Dumas had driven six hundred miles in an ancient Land Rover whose sprung shocks
amplified every ridge, bump, and pothole – minehole, Dumas joked, and Ileana
didn’t bother to point out that the oblong craters looked like they were caused
by mortar fire rather than land mines, whose blast radius tends to be perfectly
circular.
The journey across the Sahel had left them parched, and they came down to the
bar to wash the dust out of their throats. Ileana arrived a few minutes after
Dumas, found the Frenchman looking skeptically around the seedy room. But after
a brief exchange in broken English (along with the “gift” of a few American
dollars) Ileana convinced the Acropole’s barman to produce a bottle
enigmatically labeled Cocker Spaniard. “Kentuckessee whiskey,” the barman said.
“Number one brand.” Despite the fact that Ileana paid for it, he handed the
bottle to Dumas.
“I’m impressed.” Dumas squinted at the label, which looked as if it had been
written by hand. “I think.”
Ileana popped the cork and poured them each a drink.
“Save the compliments till you’ve tasted it.” She held up her glass. “Death is
in my sight today.” She tossed her drink back and closed her eyes, shuddered
pleasantly as the gasoline-colored liquor stung its way down her esophagus. She
ran her tongue over her tingling lips to savor every last drop of the burn.
When she opened her eyes, Dumas was staring at her with more than scientific
curiosity.
“‘Death is in my sight’?”
“Something a friend taught me.” Ileana’s tone discouraged further questioning.
Dumas nodded, held his drink up.
“To friends,” he said, casting another glance at his companion. “Old and new.”
The epidemiologist downed his drink. When he could speak again, he cursed: in
French, English, and a language Ileana didn’t recognize. Spaniard? she thought
with an inner laugh. Kentuckessean?
The scientist excused himself to go the washroom. “I hope it is safer than the
alcohol,” he panted, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.
Ileana glanced around as her companion tottered off. The rundown room certainly
seemed an unlikely place for a pair of international aid workers to end up. The
sawdust on the floor was stained with spilled drinks, the air clogged with
sweet-smelling shisha smoke wafting from an enormous hookah on a corner table.
After the devastation of Darfur, Ileana would have preferred to sip a chilled
lychee martini on a palm-shaded verandah with the majestic Nile in the
background. But the Legion’s last known twenty for her target was here, and the
front desk had confirmed that a guest by the name of Antonio Soma had checked in
several days earlier. The clerk declined to mention the room number aloud, so
Ileana folded a blank piece of paper into an envelope, scrawled Soma’s name on
it, and watched as the clerk slipped it into a cubbyhole. 206.
In truth, Ileana hated knowing the name. Wished all she had was that number.
Names made it harder. More personal. More human. Some members of the Legion hid
behind words like “ichthys,” “mandorla,” or “vesica pisces,” archaic terminology
that attempted to draw a philological distinction between target and host, but
Ileana had no time for compartmentalized thinking. Her quarry was formidable
enough as it was. She didn’t need to distract herself with mind games and
rationalizations.
But still. She hated knowing the name.
Unfortunately, her mobile phone wasn’t receiving pictures, so “Antonio Soma” was
all she had to go on. Her contact had described him as “on the tall side,”
slightly built, with dark hair, dark eyes, olive skin. Not exactly novel
features in an Arabic capital. But there were other things more telling than
hair or eye color, or names for that matter. That had been Alec’s first lesson,
all those years ago.
Some two dozen men were scattered around the bar. Ileana ignored the groups,
confining her attention to the single men. Her target would not want to make
friends. She judged each sidelong glance for an appetite that betrayed a more
than carnal hunger. She made no effort to conceal herself. There was an
invisibility in being watched: no one would suspect the most conspicuous person
in the room of engaging in subterfuge. She smoothed her dark blond hair into a
ponytail, fished a rubber band from a pocket. Her bare arms moved dexterously,
the skin so taut it revealed the action of the muscles beneath. Deltoid,
triceps, and biceps flexed and stretched, augmenting the action of the rotator
cuff in one of those miracles of human anatomy that go unnoticed on less refined
specimens. Few would have guessed she was over thirty, and not just because of
her lithe body. Her face was as smooth as a teenager’s. Some would’ve said it
was because she rarely smiled – no smile, no smile lines – and only a blind
man could have denied it was a beautiful face, with its Slavic cheekbones and
almond-shaped gray eyes. But it was a cold beauty, aloof, untouchable. Not that
many men hadn’t tried – and at least one succeeded, if the watch on her left
wrist was any evidence. The band was an intricately woven platinum braid, the
face broad, thick, unadorned. A man’s watch. Ileana had been rubbing it
unconsciously for the past several minutes. She caught herself now, smiled at
the watch wistfully, gave the knob a couple of turns.
When she looked up she saw Dumas returning from the washroom. The scientist’s
presence caused a chain reaction throughout the room as, one after another, the
men looked away from her. She suppressed a frown. Dumas was genial, but she’d
hoped to ditch him so she could concentrate on her hunt. But apparently her
companion was not to be deterred. The tuft of dark hair that showed in the gap
between the top two buttons of his requisite UN-issue khaki shirt made Ileana’s
chest tighten. Was Dumas actually going to make a pass at her? But all the
Frenchman did was pick up his glass with a theatrical air of trepidation.
“This stuff is absolute poison.”
Ileana didn’t take her eyes from the room. “Probably made from rotten yams and
siphoned gasoline.”
Dumas swirled the liquor in his glass. As Ileana watched his fingers, she
remembered how delicately he’d probed patient after patient in the refugee
camps. A true healer’s hands, nimble and nurturing, attuned to the flesh beneath
the fingertips. She tried to think of the last time she’d felt a man’s hands on
her body, then tried even harder to forget. She reached nervously for her watch,
then jerked her hand back to her side. This is no time to get distracted, she
chastised herself, let alone sentimental. Focus.
Her contact had said Soma was clean-shaven. That could change in a week, of
course – hell, the target’s sex could change in a week – but even so, she
ruled out all the men with long beards, which took care of three-quarters of the
room. In fact, there was only one patron about whom she had any lingering
suspicions, a young man, little more than a boy really, who wore his wispy
mustache with the pride of someone only recently able to grow facial hair. He
couldn’t have been more than eighteen or twenty. His dusty gray business suit
was too small for his long legs, but he wore it as he did his mustache, with an
air of adolescent panache. More to the point, he seemed to be checking Ileana
out. She couldn’t be sure because of the pair of knock-off Ray-Bans that covered
his eyes, despite the dimness of the smoky room.
Beside her, Dumas sighed heavily. “What I wouldn’t give for a nice glass of
Pernod.”
Ileana ignored her companion. She stared into the reflective black lenses and
made a silent offer.
“A chair at a cafe in Montparnasse. Paris, you know, in the springtime …”
The boy bit. He took his glasses off and glanced at her once, then quickly
looked away. But the glance was all Ileana needed. The adolescent shyness, the
nervousness of a john. The poor boy seemed to think the brazen Western woman in
her revealing (if not exactly feminine) attire was for sale.
Ileana nearly jumped at the sound of her own sigh of relief. Calm down, she told
herself, or you’ll be useless when Soma really does show. Easing onto her stool,
she turned and gave her attention to Dumas.
“Paris.” She forced a laugh. “You would settle for the Seine when you have the
Nile – the three Niles – at your disposal?”
“It’s true, the Seine is a trickle from a rusty tap compared to the Father of
All Rivers. But the liquor -” Dumas held up his glass “- makes up for the
lack of scenery.”
“I would have thought your work had inured you to the need for such creature
comforts.”
Dumas laughed mirthlessly. “I do not think anyone ever becomes inured, as you
say, to such … things.” His English was good, but Ileana had to admit it was
hard to come up with synonyms for what they’d seen in Darfur. “Such …”
“Atrocities?”
Dumas’s expression wasn’t so much unsympathetic as resigned. “The brutality of
war is old news, no? Especially this kind of ethnic war?”
“I’m Croatian,” Ileana murmured. “I know.”
“Ah!” Dumas didn’t heed the warning in her voice. “I have been wondering about
your accent for the past two weeks.” He smiled a little too eagerly. “I did two
years in Bosnia and Herzegovina with Médecins Sans Frontières. Doctors Without
Borders. Ninety-three and ’94. Believe me, I understand.”
Ileana nodded, but doubted that even someone who’d pulled bullets from flesh and
sewn up limbs ravaged by shrapnel could understand what she’d endured. She
poured two more shots. Alcohol offered its own kind of understanding, and she
touched Dumas’s glass with hers and swilled the fiery liquid as though it were a
toast to the fallen.
Dumas shuddered as the whiskey went down. “Are you sure you’re not Russian?” he
said when he could talk again. “You drink like a professional.”
“Self-discipline.” Ileana smiled. “Self … possession,” she added, but so low the
last word was inaudible.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Body Surfing
by Dale Peck
Copyright © 2009 by Dale Peck.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Atria
Copyright © 2009
Dale Peck
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7612-9
